The neural mechanisms for the visual recognition of objects extend beyond striate cortex into multiple extrastriate cortical areas within the occipital, temporal, and parietal lobes. To understand the neural mechanisms of perception and memory in these areas, we are studying 1) passive sensory coding by single neurons in the immobilized monkey 2) dynamic aspects of coding by neurons in an awake monkey performing a visual discrimination and memory task and 3) the functional architecture of the cortex utilizing local metabolic mapping techniques. In one area, area V4, we have found that neurons code many local features of objects, such as the length and width oc contours, textures, and colors. As neurons in this area are sensitive to form and color differences between a stimulus and its background, they may play a role in separating figure from ground. One of the primary functions of the corpus callosum in area V4 appears to be to integrate the figure/ground mechanism across both halves of the visual field. Unlike neurons in parietal cortex, neurons in V4 are affected very little by the spatial location of the animal's attention. In inferior temporal cortex we found that over half the neurons were tuned to a set of shape descriptors that can be used to code object shape. Since different neurons are tuned to different descriptors, a population of inferior temporal neurons could code any shape. Finally, we have found that another extrastriate area, area MT, is specialized for analyzing stimulus motion and contains direction-of-motion columns similar to the orientation columns discovered in primary visual cortex. Whereas area V4 and inferior temporal cortex from part of an occipito-temporal system for object recognition, area MT contributes to an occipito-parietal system for spatial perception.